mappinghttp://member.iftf.org/taxonomy/term/478/all
enLocating Change: Science and Technology Controversieshttp://member.iftf.org/node/4081
http://member.iftf.org/node/4081#commentscomplexitycontroversiesdiversityforesightinnovationmappingmonstersrisksocietytechnologyThe Future Now<p class="p1">2011 was a year of transition and change. In 2012, locating change</p><p class="p1">&nbsp;</p><p class="p1">Scientific and technological controversies are similar to dilemmas and wicked problems; they are not readily reducible to stepwise solutions. A simple example of a controversy might be the question of how life on planet earth began. This might seem pretty straightforward, but it turns out that a whole lot of different people, groups, professions, organisms, and technologies have a lot to say on the matter. But let's leave the origin of life aside for the moment. Controversies are<em> debates surrounding a technique or scientific fact that has yet to be determined</em>, and they tend to generative source of information and meaning for technology foresight.</p>
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<p class="p1">One of the ways that controversies can help generate insight is because they are disruptive. Science and technology controversies reproduce conflicts around people's fundamental preferences for how the world operates. These conflicts are what you see in the news headlines as fundamental preferences (from a political science perspective) over outcomes or, in contract, instrumental preferences for how to go about achieving a desired outcome. Fundamental preferences are particularly sensitive to the different ways that problems can be framed and the point of view or perspective one takes. They also contain values that can be sacred to people, and these sacred values often serve as core commitments to deep-seated assumptions about nature, culture, and society. For many, violating sacred values would be akin to disrupting some of the the most salient rules that people use to organize their daily decisions, behaviors, and actions. Science and technology controversies tend to disrupt people's assumptions in real and imagined ways, and that's a great place to begin to investigate how technology can serve as catalyst for change.</p>
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<p class="p1">More importantly, the disagreements that arise from controversies manifest <em>because</em> they involve diverse, heterogeneous human and non-human actors. Diversity can mean a lot of things. When talking about people's fundamental preferences, diversity means how they understand concepts, processes, causation, emergence, and the conceptual change that accompanies learning and movement between these as explanations for the world. But another source of diversity in science and technology controversies is the different types of people, animals, technologies, bacteria, or rocks that crop up in claims about what does and does not contribute to claims about what matters in the world. Different types imply different functionality – meaning they do things differently from others or exhibit different properties. Different mixtures or hybrids of organisms and materials generate new and interesting interactions. A rabbit, a hat, a magician, and a table produce an illusion, while some partially killed virus, a syringe, some saline solution, and white blood cells produce immunity. Diversity is a critical and necessary feature of complexity.&nbsp; Because things mix and interact differently and in different configurations at different times and in different places, diversity often frustrates agreement on the questions to be solved in enduring controversies – much less the answers or solution paths. Diversity and heterogeneity help us understand what's really going on (and with whom) when technology and society start interacting with each other. Controversies are a good way to start tracing those interactions.</p>
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<p class="p1">Put another way, controversies are sources of uncertainty where different people and things are seeking representation in society. Rather than ignore the unexpected occurrence or complication, we can learn to embrace it not as something to be left out, but as something we need to more carefully assemble into our practice. The rare and the unexpected are integral to the present, and they have ways of hitchhiking their way into the future. Science and technological controversies uncannily enrich the present and the future with legal, moral, economic, ecological, and social questions – in part because we didn't think the actors involved mattered when in fact they did.&nbsp; When they do emerge, all sorts of new questions are raised. This is why one of the great contributions of science fiction is its ability to create monsters and technologies from the ether. When they show up out of nowhere, they challenge us to think more broadly and to make new connections.&nbsp;</p>
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<p class="p1">New actors and monsters come from unexpected places, and it's in those places that we can recognize disruptive change indicating plausible and internally-consistent alternative futures most clearly. It can also be difficult to tell which of the myriad of actors are relevant and how that can be used to limit the scope of our attention to a controversy and the possibilities for change that emerge as insights. Gregory Bateson's definition of information seems workable – where an actor is anything or anyone that makes a difference to the outcome.</p>
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<p class="p1">Consider the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform which sank and spilled crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer of 2010. As news diffused to the public, a new technology actor, the blowout preventer, became widely known – complete with cross-section diagrams and details of its operation and role as a safety device.&nbsp; How many people outside of deep water oil exploration were familiar with a blowout preventer before the Deepwater Horizon disaster?&nbsp; This sudden appearance of the blowout preventer as a technological actor was made visible by its own breakdown, and in turn, many social, ecological, political and technological processes were made visible in the aftermath. Clearly, the blowout preventer was a critical component that mattered to the outcome of the Deepwater Horizon.&nbsp; However, had it not failed, we never would have been made aware of the many other critical components that also mattered but that happened not to have been purely technological. We are still untangling the organizational implications of deep sea oil exploration, such as if and how the presence or absence of hierarchy led to the collapse of the rig, or if it even mattered. But these questions will be debated, and in them are the seeds of our emerging social contract with each other, governance, nature, and technology.</p>
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<p class="p1">Figure 1: This graph of edits to the Wikipedia entry on blowout protector demonstrates how people's interests and concerns transition for new technological actors. In the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the blowout protector became a critical piece of infrastructure for safety AND an instantaneous piece of infrastructure for public discourse. The public controversy around the blowout protector and its role among the many interactions brought together different perspectives and statements about how society deals with risk and accidents. &nbsp;</p>
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<p class="p1">I've been exploring the potential of a method for <em>Mapping Controversies</em> as a way to identify some of the leading voices of uncertain actors – ones that are invisible to most of us, most of the time, but that have the potential to reveal significant insights into technology, society, and the alternative futures surrounding them. In moving from insight to action, Western science has always depended in part on the channeling of non-human voices through its writing and demonstrations&nbsp; – manifested as public, descriptive, and virtual forms of witnessing. These result in the eventual acceptance of socially normalized facts. One infamous example of this is when Thomas Edison publicly executed an elephant and other animals to help him establish a "fact" in peoples' minds that Nicola Tesla's system of alternating current was more dangerous than his own direct current system of electricity distribution. In this case, Edison's argument was that the animals served as proxies for human experience if Tesla's alternative future was to be undertaken.</p>
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<p class="p1">Controversies present us with forking paths. Perhaps we create better, more insightful opportunities for ourselves to understand and implicate the opportunities and trade-offs we make in technology choices and applications when we&nbsp;<span>map these paths as they happen.</span></p>
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<p class="p1">As technological artifacts become ever more ubiquitous and diverse in the scientization of everyday life, non-human voices are being amplified through technological breakdowns, agency, and experimental events whereas in history until now, they came more often from nature. Looking back through history, a common element of all religions is animism –&nbsp;which is and always was human agency allowing "the other" a privileged access to the category of "human". As we begin to encourage and grant our tools access to the category of human, we are going to be challenged by many more ways of interpreting the world – as well as new fundamental preferences for what we ought to do. This is happening simply as a result of greater complexity in our world. What new tools will we use to understand these transitions? How will we decide what matters and what doesn't?</p>
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<p class="p1">In subsequent articles I'll try to unpack these a bit, and, with a little help from my friends, tease out some implications for the design and communication of foresight –&nbsp;and why these matter.</p><p class="p1">&nbsp;</p>Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:36:31 +0000Gabriel Harp4081 at http://member.iftf.orgMapping Kenya's largest slumhttp://member.iftf.org/node/3163
http://member.iftf.org/node/3163#commentsAfricagrassrootskenyamappingslumThe Future NowTechnology Horizons<div>
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Kenya has begun an impressive project to <a href="http://www.techmasai.com/2009/11/map-kibera-is-an-initiative-to-create-a-digital-map-of-kenyas-biggest-slum/"><span style="text-decoration: underline; color: #4e00ff">map Kibera</span></a>, it's largest slum. Although Kibera has an estimated 1 million inhabitants, the sum is a big black spot on any map. This makes the process of community development projects next to impossible as no one can begin to plan improvements on a big black hole.
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The best part of the project is young Kibera residents are being trained to be able to create the map themselves. 12 youths will be trained in digital mapping technologies in a 2 day workshop, after which they will map Kibera for two weeks in the middle of November and share their results through <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/"><span style="text-decoration: underline; color: #4e00ff">OpenStreetMap</span></a>, a creative commons open-source map editable and usable by anyone anywhere.
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Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:24:51 +0000Tessa Finlev3163 at http://member.iftf.orgA new iPhone app provides opportunities for grassroots, participatory epidemiologyhttp://member.iftf.org/node/3119
http://member.iftf.org/node/3119#commentscitizen public healthepidemiologyiPhonemappingmobile healthpublic healthHealth Horizons<p>
<a href="http://healthmap.org/iphone.php">Outbreaks Near Me</a> enables users to track and report outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as H1N1 (swine flu), on the ground in real time. This new iPhone app is from <a href="http://healthmap.org/en">HealthMap</a>, a website that mines the Internet for disparate data sources of varying reliability—from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization)—to track and map infectious disease outbreaks.
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HealthMap was founded in 2006 by researchers at <a href="http://www.childrenshospital.org/" target="_blank">Children's Hospital Boston</a> in collaboration with the <a href="http://www.media.mit.edu/">MIT Media Lab</a>. They have published a number of journal articles about their work, including &quot;<a href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp0900702" target="_blank">Digital Disease Detection — Harnessing the Web for Public Health Surveillance</a>&quot; in the <i>New England Journal of Medicine</i>; you can access a list <a href="http://healthmap.org/press.php" target="_blank">here</a>, along with links to the extensive media coverage the site has received.
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Outbreaks Near Me allows users to pinpoint outbreaks that have been reported in their vicinity, and to search for additional outbreak information by location or disease. The app's functionality includes the ability to set alerts that will notify a user on their device or by e-mail when new outbreaks are reported in their proximity, or if a user enters a new area of activity.
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I probably would have blogged about Outbreaks Near Me even if it was only a cool new health information iPhone app. But what makes it really interesting to me is that it allows people to become more proactive about public health. The phrase &quot;grassroots, participatory epidemiology&quot; in my headline comes from HealthMap co-founder Clark Freifeld, who explained in a <a href="http://www.childrenshospital.org/newsroom/Site1339/mainpageS1339P1sublevel559.html" target="_blank">press release</a> that he and his fellow researchers hope that the app will
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empower citizens in the cause of public health, not only by providing ready access to real-time information, but also by encouraging them to contribute their own knowledge, expertise, and observations. In enabling participation in surveillance, we also expect to increase global coverage and identify outbreaks earlier.
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Outbreaks Near Me features an option for users anywhere in the world to submit an outbreak report to the HealthMap system, and to include photos—of situations and scenarios of, and/or leading to, disease—taken with their iPhone. These efforts at public health surveillance are then reviewed and may be posted as alerts on a worldwide map.<br />
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Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:00:06 +0000Vivian Distler3119 at http://member.iftf.orgIFTF 2004 Forecast demo now an iPhone applicationhttp://member.iftf.org/node/2036
http://member.iftf.org/node/2036#commentsgeowebmappingtech horizonsTechnology Horizons<p>
It was bound to happen: Colleen Morgan, an archeologist from the University of California, Berkeley working at the historic San Francisco Presidio, has created an almost perfectly similar mobile mapping application for an iPhone as a nearly identical demo application that Chris Goad created, and Jason Tester populated with both real and fanciful geodata for the IFTF Technology Horizons New Geographies conference in 2004 also at the San Francisco Presidio!!
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Participants will recall wandering around Fort Scott looking for geotagged data with kludgey combination of HP Tablets, with Garmin GPSs attached by a long cable. Colleen's nifty iPhone application using flickr and other off-the shelf mash-up tools sure looks like a lot more fun to use!
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http://remixpresidio.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/using-flickr-to-geospatially-embed-archaeological-interpretation/
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Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:03:37 +0000Michael Liebhold2036 at http://member.iftf.org